Beards Are The Most Attractive, Other Scientists Now Say

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Score one for the bearded.Again. For now. Because a new study published by the journal Evolution and Human Behaviorreports that women find men with "heavy stubble" most attractive, trailed by an apparent mob of disgusting fully bearded, lightly stubbled, and clean-shaven men, all of whom the fairer sex found to be about equally attractive to one another. (In fairness, full beards were rated highest for perceived parenting ability and healthiness.)

For the bald-faced among us, this comes as a bit of a surprise (by which we mean: punch to the groin). It was only three years ago that Schick's Skin-dex Survey declared that shaven men have sex about twice as much as those who don't. And that 64% of women would rather sleep with a cleanly shaven man — senses of humor and bloodlines held constant, we assume. (For the reasonable skeptics of companies who release polls: Schick does make a trimmer, too — though we of course see your point. Though we also guess you have a beard.)

And so now we're left with this: evolutionary scientists who stare at hairy Homo heidelbergensises all day saying that women like hirsute men, versus a razor company saying that, No, actually, women like men with faces as smooth as Pitbull saying "Dale!" — which, come to think of it, now irks the hell out of us, too.

Dammit.

Screw polls. Let's all just ask our grandmothers how good we look.

(Full disclosure: The author of this article recently shaved his goatee, cannot grow thick enough stubble on his cheeks, and has therefore entered a general state of distress over all of this.)